Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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A 70-year-old Japanese man who describes himself as a professional “fundoshi”, or “poop soil master” has been moving bowels outdoors for almost half a centuries, and encouraging others to follow his example.

Masana Izawa, a published mushroom and moss photographer, is famous for avoiding indoor toilets as much as he can. In fact, he prides himself with the fact that he has only pooped indoor 14 times in the last 20 years, and then only because he had no other choice. Whether he is at his home in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture, in an urban environment or in the middle of nature, Izawa always does his number two outdoors. He believes that relieving ourselves in the soil rather than in dead plumbing is our responsibility as humans, and he has taken it upon himself to convince people that their poop isn’t worthless at all.

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Looking at the stylish garments made by graduating art student Rie Sakamoto, you’d be tempted to think they are made of brown yarn, but in fact, every piece in her collection is made of knitted rubber bands.

Rie Sakamoto is graduating from Tama Art University, in Tokyo this year and for her thesis she decided to focus on the humble but versatile rubber band. From a staple of office stationery to improvised wrist strap, the rubber band has literally hundreds of uses, but fabric for fashionable clothes most likely wasn’t one of them. But that was before Sakamoto got her hands on a few thousands of brown rubber bands and knitted them into dresses, bolero jackets, and more.

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Japanese model Kato Sari recently finalized her divorce from her husband, after getting separated from him just a week into their marriage, due to her uncontrolled money spending habits.

29-year-old Kato Sari has always been known for her luxurious lifestyle and love of expensive fashion brands, but her husband never imagined that her spending habits would end up putting his businesses at risk. The unnamed real-estate businessman reportedly started dating the model in May of 2019, and in the three and a half months before the pair tied the knot, she had managed to spend about 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) of his money. Still, the man went through with the wedding, but during the first week of their marriage, he allegedly told Sari to slow down her spending, as his businesses weren’t fairing very well. That didn’t sit too well with her, so she asked for a divorce.

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A 61-year-old postal worker from the Japanese city of Yokohama was recently arrested for hoarding around 24,000 pieces of mail that he had failed to deliver since back in 2003.

Officials at Japan Post, the government-owned mail service, noticed there was something peculiar about the unnamed postal worker’s activity last year, and he was let go. However, the cache of hidden mail was discovered later, because it was located in his home, “which is beyond the confines of an internal inspection”. The 61-year-old admitted to failing to deliver the tens of thousands of letters and parcels, claiming that doing his job “was too much bother”. But he didn’t want his younger colleagues to think he was less capable than them, so he just hid the mail at home.

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A convenience store owner in Osaka, japan, sparked a lot of controversy recently when he decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s. Appaerntly that was a pretty big deal in a country where convenience stores a traditionally open 24/7, all year long.

While convenience stores are still pretty popular in the United States, they are nothing compared to the so-called “konbini” stores found on every corner of every street in urban Japan. They are beacons of hope that make life easier for the average person, offering a wide range of services (ATMs, Wi-Fi, printing, delivery services, etc.), as well as groceries, all in one place, day and night. In fact, the thing that makes Japanese convenience stores so convenient is that they are open all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it possible for anyone to pick up some groceries, pay the bills or get a quick bite to eat,whenever they need to. So when one convenience store owner decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s, it made national news.

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A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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It sounds almost impossible to believe, but the Japanese schoolgirl in the pictures below is actually a middle-aged, married man.

According to Wikipedia, Takuma Tani is a Japanese male vocalist born in 1977. That description doesn’t fit too well with his current image, because virtually every photo of the guy has him looking like a young schoolgirl. Takuma showed an inclination for the art from a very young age, learning piano and vocal music at the age of three. In junior high-school he started writing poems, and at age 28, he became the vocalist of a Japanese rock group. At 34, Takuma decided to adopt the image of a petite schoolgirl, and he’s been doing it successfully ever since. Even though he’s in his early 40s now, Takuma Tani still maintains his incredibly youthful and feminine looks, which have been known to confuse many on the internet.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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A young Japanese couple have come up with an ingenious way of making their one-year-old son stop crying whenever he notices that his mother isn’t around – life-size cardboard cutouts of the woman placed strategically in the room he is playing in.

Fuki Sato recently became an overnight sensation after photos of her life-size cutouts went viral all around the world. It’s not that they’re unusually life-like – although they do seem very well done – it’s what they are used that has gotten the family so much attention online. Apparently Sato and er husband had been having trouble calming down their one-year-old boy, who would start to cry whenever he noticed that she wasn’t around. Since staying by his side 24/7 really wasn’t an option, they decided to have her be around the child all the time, while not really being there.

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Our online data is already monetized by several technology giants, but one Japanese IT company thinks real-life data could be monetized as well, and it’s willing to pay people to have their everyday life video-recorded and sold to various businesses.

Last month, Tokyo-based Plasma.inc made national news headlines for inviting people to take part in a controversial social experiment called “Project Exograph”. Participants must agree to have their living rooms, bathrooms, changing areas, kitchens and other parts of their homes wired with cameras that would film them continuously for roughly one month. At the end of the experiment, the footage will be edited in a way that would make it impossible to identify protagonists, and then sent to various companies to see if it can be monetized. Believe it or not, hundreds of people have already signed up for a chance to take part in Project Exograph.

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A 71-year-old pensioner from Saitama, Japan, was recently arrested and charged with obstruction of business after allegedly calling the toll-free number of his telecom provider a whopping 24,000 times over the last two years, to complain about the service and demand apologies.

In the month of October alone, Akitoshi Okamoto, a 71-year-old man from Kasukabe City, allegedly called the toll-free number of Japanese telecom giant KDDI 411 times in a single week to complain about his phone not being able to pick up radio broadcasts. Over the last two years, KDDI registered around 24,000 calls from Okamoto, which works out to an average of 33 phone calls a day, but the corporation had been reluctant to press charges until last week, when the frequency of complaints became too much to bear.

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Can you imagine an inhabited city where the water running through the the drain channels is so pure that beautiful koi fish can swim in it? Well, such a place exists on Japan’s Kyushu island. It’s called Shimabara, and it’s quite a sight to behold.

When the area around Shimabara was affected by the natural disaster known as the “1792 Unzen earthquake and tsunami” which killed 15,000 people, no one imagined that the dozens of fresh water springs that started gushing out would one day put the city on Japan’s travel map and inspire its now famous nickname – the “City of Water”. There are at least 60 known springs throughout Shimabara, making clean water one of the city’s most abundant resources. There is so much of it, in fact, that it flows through the drain channels along some streets. But that’s not even the craziest thing about this place; because the water is so pure, at one point authorities decided to put some koi carp in the channels, and Shimabara became the City of Swimming Carp.

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Getting a hotel room for $1 a night can be considered a bargain pretty much anywhere in the world, and especially so in a country like Japan. But getting the huge discount comes with a catch, and it’s a big one.

Tourists visiting the Japanese city of Fukuoka on a budget can get a stellar deal at Business Ryokan Asahi, a welcoming inn located about a 15-minute walk from the city’s shopping and entertainment area. For just 130 yen (about $1.20) anyone can book a room there for a night, as long as they don’t mind giving up their privacy. That’s because in order to take advantage of this amazing offer, you have to agree to let the hotel live-stream your whole stay on its YouTube channel.

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Onion hardly seems like the best vegetable to base a soft drink on, but Onionade doesn’t contain the kind of onion you’re used to, but a new type that not only doesn’t make you cry when you chop it, but it unusually sweet as well.

Back in 2016 we reported on one of the most interesting inventions to come out of Japan in the past few years – a tear-free onion named “Smile Ball”. Developed over a period of 14 years by scientists at House Foods Group, Smile Ball onions release almost no tear-inducing compounds when chopped or eaten raw, and have a much sweeter taste than regular onions. Available in Japanese grocery stores for the past two years, Smile Balls have been marketed mainly as tear-free alternatives to the common onion, but now its producers want to promote the vegetable’s sweetness and pleasant flavor as well. And what better way to do that than by producing an onion-based drink called Onionade?

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